> It's a pity they aren't releasing on Steam though. Most players aren't going to buy the game from the Win10 store.

I agree but I'd go even further: it's a pity they aren't releasing as standalone. Where are the good old days when using a locked platform wasn't required to install a game?

It's not the matter of a locked platform per se. Releasing a game on a platform like Steam just increases the likelihood of someone buying it manifold.

The age of physical discs are over, but the developer is still free to release a DRM-free version of the game independently. Witcher 3's Projeckt Red does this. You can simply enter the product key received from Steam to download this DRM free copy.

Those days were gone when DRM became an acceptable thing defended by people even on this site.

Its always that one CEO, wanting to emulate the success that is steam by becoming basically becoming the market and the platform. Self-delusion and believe-shapes-reality needs some realistic observation or else one wastes ridiculous amounts of money reinventing the wheel only for the crowd to flock to the first wheel shop anyway.

Those are resources that could go into inventing the first plane. And some superior sooner or later realizes that you are on a unimaginative crusade and cuts the lifeline, resulting in a dead market-plattform, with contract-bound studios being dragged down with the sinking ship.

Windows Store has been surprisingly fragile for me. I've bought a couple of games through it and things like turning off IPv6 will cause it to fail to download anything and spit out cryptic error codes.

But mostly I don't want my games spread across a dozen different storefronts. Keeping them all in once place is more convenient. I would probably be more open to the Windows Store if I owned an XBox and there was some kind of integration, but I don't.

Steam is doing even worse with IPv6 support – in fact they have absolutely none (although their CDN provider has great support for it). Really a shame that they're missing such an useful piece of functionality in this day and age. This of course has made me consider some of the alternatives...

Unfortunately the only Steam alternatives that have some amount of IPv6 support are Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming. Though you may as well not count Humble Bundle as accessing their website over IPv6 results in it being completely broken [1].

[1] https://vgy.me/0E4HBm.png

I'm curious -- why would IPv6 access for a website be an important matter?

It's faster, it's cheaper, it's easier to setup and use. As of now not everyone always has IPv4 access anymore. I conciously avoid purchasing products that have no IPv6 support, as I sometimes have an only IPv6 connection.

20% of the world uses it.

Okay but 100% of the world uses IPv4. Why is having IPv6 support important for a website?

Because IPv4 is close to exhausted[1] and we need IPv6 support to be the rule, not the exception, by the time it's no longer affordable to get an IPv4 address.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

Not supporting IPv6 is better than breaking in mysterious ways when you have IPv6 support but have to disable it on that machine for reasons (Netflix).

I would like to see Valve get with the times on their v6 support though.

I've never seen a dualstack connection cause breakage. And if it does break with IPv6 support being available, then it's the developer's fault. Instead of disabling IPv6 you should alert them of the problem and if possible use an alternative service, which supports IPv6.

In the case of Humble Bundle breaking, it seems simply because some of their CDN subdomains are IPv4-only. Since the site loads various resources from those IPv4-only endpoints, it causes everything to just break when accessing over IPv6. In a way I'd argue it's still better than your browser displaying "no valid IP address for this domain" – usually you can at least find an e-mail address at the bottom of the page to alert them to the problem.

>Though you may as well not count Humble Bundle as accessing their website over IPv6 results in it being completely broken

Just checked this in Firefox and it loads completely fine via IPv6 (and I verified using the devtools that it is using IPv6).

Should've clarified. In this case I was on a IPv6-only connection – no IPv4 access available to the outside. Loading with both IPv6 and IPv4 being available of course results in no problems, as it falls back to IPv4 for resources that are not accessible over IPv6 (which is mainly the layout scripts).

Also, if you have a Windows Update pending that requires a reboot, attempting to install anything from the Windows Store will fail, sometimes with a cryptic error code and sometimes not even that.

I'd say it'a a pity they aren't releasing it on GoG! Win10 and Steam are both DRM.

They can do both. Steam is just a larger platform.

Why not? A MS account is not uncommon.

Personally, I can play a Windows game purchased on Steam on Linux/MacOS using Wine (This is how I currently play Age of Empires II). You can't say the same about a Windows Store game.

There is a stigma in the PC gamer community against Microsoft, especially after Games for Windows. "Steam or go home" sentiments also aren't all that uncommon. As for the accounts - I really don't know anyone who actually uses the MS store (whereas pretty much everyone who plays video games has a Steam account), and I interact with plenty of end-users daily. Maybe it just happens that the area I live in never adopted it, but I would still say that Steam is the better platform to try to get exposure on.

Trading one monopoly for another, I guess.

A thus far benevolent monopoly who have indicated positive intent and applicable thought patterns (i.e. the whole piracy is service problem).

They could release it on origin...

Joke aside, i assume a month later they will release on steam. The red number sirens and the fear of pirates have convinced a lot of sailors to rock the boat.

Can you login to the store without linking your entire computer to that email?

yes, but it's still a bad store :(

Games stores (for better or worse) are expected to have an ecosystem of services of varying importance:

- Friends list

- Text & Audio chat

- Cloud saves

- Automatic updates

- DLC installation

- Sales and Discounts

- Curation, suggestions, and browsing

- Achievements

The Microsoft Store has most of those, more or less, but the experience is not ideal.

The social services are tied into the Xbox app which works okay, but is quite complicated and Microsofty. Also PC gamers might not have their friends on Xbox or maybe it has their CoD friends, not their AoE friends, etc.

The MS store is not purpose-built for games, so it makes it a poor place to buy them. It's hard to find "real games" on there because you have to sift through mobile games, photoshop, movies, and Xbox controllers. Many PC stores make a big deal about sales with purpose-built home pages, best seller lists, weekly sales, event sales, newsletters, etc. The MS store does not have sales often and if they do you're not likely to hear about them. PC stores put a lot of effort into discoverability. There's personalized home pages, followed curators, recommendations from friends, and detailed search systems with a multitude of tags and sorting options. You can search for a recently released co-op action-rpg with steam controller support and sort by recent review sentiment. The MS store, by comparison, is a mobile app store on a computer.

PC Game stores are expected to have fast and reliable downloads. Steam can consistently download faster than my hard drive can write, and can reliably resume interrupted downloads. Steam can validate the integrity of game files and re-download them if necessary. Other clients seem to do fine as well. Download speeds from the MS store are reportedly inconsistent, and it has (or had) no ability to resume interrupted downloads. For weeks after the ~100GB Gears 4 was released exclusively on the MS store, /r/pcgaming was full of people complaining that the download was interrupted at 95GB and had to start over from 0.

All of these problems are solvable. I believe the download issues have been fixed. The store is already the best place to buy "Play Anywhere" titles if you have an Xbox, simply because you get it on both platforms. But MS has a long way to go to make the store pleasant to use and to win back PC gamers' sentiment.

One practically unsolvable problem is that the store doesn't exist on Linux, macOS, or Win 7, which matters to some portion of games and some portion of gamers.

Literally never used the MS Store

I even go so far as to block all requests to MS Store (via winstore.app.exe) with NetLimiter. I also block outlookcommunications, microsoft.photos.exe and video.ui.exe, all of which I never use but they keep wanting to call home every few days).

Why do you stay with a system whose developer has proven to act against your interest?

What's the alternative? And before you offer some obvious answer, remember that we're in the context of a Windows-only game :)

Gaming for Windows Live died. Let it stay dead.

I have never used the windows app store but I might for this, which is probably the point.